Artificial intelligence out performs pathologists

cp418

https://www.methodsman.com/blog/ai-breast-cancer

Bosombuddy101

Thank-you for posting this. Progress is always a good thing! It never occurred to me that false negative lymph nodes was such a huge issue so I did a Google search and found this sobering article--- this may explain why lymph node negative early stage breast cancer can lead to metastatic disease. Another thing to worry about.

The false-negative rate of sentinel node biopsy in patients with breast cancer: a meta-analysis

Sarah Pesek, MD,1 Taka Ashikaga, PhD,1 Lars Erik Krag, MD,2 and David Krag, MD1,3

Results

Of 302 articles that reported a FNR (false negative rate) value, there were 183 articles that met inclusion criteria. Overall, these articles produced 202 unique patient groups for analysis. Seventeen articles had two clearly defined groups with either different injection materials or different locations and gave FNRs for each group. One article presented three separate groups. The total number of patients included in this study was 9220. The total number of patients with false-negative axillae was 794. The crude overall FNR was 8.61% (CI: 8.05–9.2%). Using a fixed effects model assuming homogeneity between studies, the overall FNR was calculated to be 7.5% (CI: 7.0–8.1%). Dropping the homogeneity assumption, it was estimated to be 7.0% (CI: 6.1–7.9%) using a random effects model.

YoungTurkNYC

Dear Bosombuddy,

The other reason that early stage node negative BC can metastasize is that cells break off the tumor and directly go into the bloodstream at a microscopic level. BC does not need to go to the lymph nodes first to metastasize elsewhere in the body. This can even happen in the earliest stage invasive BC with very small tumors, node negative. This is why systemic treatment (e.g., chemotherapy, hormonal etc.) is so essential.

Denise-G

I always remember the discussion I had with my breast surgeon while she was reviewing my path report post surgery. I was so upset because I had 9 positive nodes. She then explained that I was fortunate that my nodes did their job as some patients' nodes do not. She then explained that she had patients who were Stage IV out of the gate with no positive nodes.

Meow13

Good point Denise. I often wonder if not having node involvement it might be stray cancer cells were not filtered.

I feel better about AI drugs than I do chemo. Chemo can kill a bunch of cancer but does it get everything, will back fire against the drug resistant cells. AI drugs will starve the cells depriving them of estrogen, but are we hurting ourselves with too little estrogen.